Whitelodge 7.5 & 7.6

-7.5-

Harmon's presence slammed back into his body, and he felt as if the avalanche was plowing him under all over again. He hadn't truly been aware of how light and ethereal he had felt, until he was confronted with the pain of the flesh again. The creeping coldness, the grinding sharpness in his broken ankle, all conspired to knock his breath out before he could properly draw it.

He gasped, turning his head back and forth to see if anything about his situation had changed since he had been gone. Unfortunately, nothing had. He thought for a moment about what an observer might have seen while he was -- well, he guessed "away" was the most benign way to describe the state he had just been in. Had he continued to breathe, and had his eyes been closed or open?

Instinctively, he wanted to push those thoughts away, to take his mind off his body. He feared he would start to become afraid if he didn't. He had been in situations similar to (though not nearly as bad as) this before, had nursed enough friends through injuries to understand the way the mind reacted to massive pain. It begins to fear that even if the body doesn't die outright, it will never quite the same again, forever scarred, one step closer to the dark descent that ultimately waits for us all. The brain begins to turn against the body, to separate itself. I'm not this crude matter, it testifies, I'm so much more! It is the mind's way of not losing its sense of control over the world, to not go stark raving mad when faced with a prison of wood, pain and snow.

But Harmon had seen friends slip away while steadfastly denying that there was anything wrong with them that a stiff drink and a smoke wouldn't fix. It turned out to be crucial to stay aware of that mind/body connection, and to embrace it. the most important thing to understand that the mind and body are inextricable, that they need each other in equal amounts. Harmon knew he must suppress this desperate, clawing attempt by the brain to retreat.

After all, hadn't the importance of this just been proven to him? He had wandered through Kerren's mind and actually done something -- blocked what felt like a foreign, invading force -- that brought her body and mind back together. He now had to maintain himself the same way. Perhaps the reason he had been afraid to use his powers in this way until now was an intuitive understanding of this. The relationship between brain and body wasn't a one-way street, with the body being only the vessel for the brain's wants and needs.

So he clung to his consciousness, resisted the urge to leave again. He had done all he could, more than he thought was possible, actually. Now it was time for him to wait until the trail he had left with Kerren to be followed, and he could be rescued. To that end, he picked up the walkie from underneath his hand (he apparently had let go in his own absence and dropped it the few inches to the surface of the snow) and began clicking the Send button again, hoping that someone was still listening on the other end.

They had agreed that he was going to check in every five minutes, but he couldn't say with any certainty how long it had been since his last transmission. In any event, he had a different message to send this time. He thought for a moment, and then selected his Morse letters: "D-i-d K t-e-l-l y-o-u w-h-e-r-e I a-m?"

He repeated the message three times, to ensure that someone picking it up even halfway through would get the full text string, and then waited. In the interest of not letting his mind drift away again, and not wanting to turn full attention to the pain he was in, he tried to focus on external sensory input. He thought he could start by checking the level of moonlight he had available. The little green power light on the walkie, weak as it was, provided most of his illumination, so he covered it to see if he were any closer to daylight than before.

There wasn't much external illumination. The moonlight coming through the vertical branches over him was still feeble and filtered through several inches of white powder, but he took a moment to notice that its source hadn't seemed to shift at all. Given the number of times he had communicated with the outside world, there should have been some change in the light quality, even if his mental voyage to Kerren had been instantaneous. That was strange.

There was some other bit of sensory info coming in, and at first he couldn't pin it down. All he knew was that something was making him uneasy, through his effort of remaining calm. Something wasn't right, and by the time he realized what it was, there was no time for him to stay still and experience it.

Rhythmic vibrations far off in the snow were coalescing into something he recognized: footsteps. Up until that moment, Harmon had been thinking that he would welcome nothing more than the feel of feet plodding along somewhere nearby. He had already planned to call out and direct whoever it was to his hiding place, but now he felt differently. There was something diabolical in them, the way they moved. He couldn't even tell how many legs were involved, or how they would have to be constructed to fall into that particular pattern.

The bottom line was there was something walking around nearby, and whatever kind of something it was seemed to be on the hunt. A short flurry of motion, then silence as it stopped and listened. If he were sure it were an animal, Harmon would guess that it was taking the time to smell the wind, hoping for a scent of something edible. But this thing, whatever it was, didn't give him the impression that it was merely sniffing around. It was looking and listening. Harmon was determined not to give it anything to react to. He let his breath slide in and out of his lungs as slowly as he could, not even trying to let it hitch when pain randomly flared in his ankle.

More than he ever had before, Harmon wanted to become part of the background, unnoticeable to whatever was out there and looking for him (while he had not consciously admitted it to himself, he knew that was exactly what it was doing). Moments before, he had been struggling to stay mentally present, and now every instinct was telling him to fade away. Perhaps leaving his body again would prove to be the best way to hide. It was a tempting experiment, but he resisted it as much as he had the strength to.

The footsteps were drawing closer, and increasing clarity did no good in figuring out exactly what was causing them. Harmon knew the footfalls of just about every creature one could encounter out in the forest, but this matched his idea of none of them. His mind conjured impossibilities as he tried to interpret the sounds: a giant crab scuttling along on hoofed feet, a bear running at full gallop but only covering a few inches with each step, maybe even something even bigger running and leaping from tree to tree, taking the time to tap out misleading rhythms on each trunk before jumping to the next.

He was suddenly very glad that he had covered up the walkie's power light to check the moon's position. He suspected that whatever it was out there would have been able to notice the difference between a fallen snow-covered tree with a tiny light under it from a fallen snow-covered tree without one. He kept his thumb in place, and with his other hand slipped a gloved hand underneath and dialed down the volume until the power switched off with a slight click. He couldn't see the LED light wink out, but he knew it had, and hoped he couldn't be detected by illumination or noise.

This was how Harmon, his body heat bleeding away into the surrounding snow faster than he realized, and being actively searched for by something he would not have asked for as a search party, missed the important message that was being sent to him from the Whitetail Lodge.

-7.6-

Benny's strength was starting to fade. Carlos had let himself believe that the ease with which he had gotten his co-worker across the restaurant floor would continue, but now it seemed that the adrenaline that had fueled their crossing was running out. He felt pulled down on that side, and it was more than just the weight of the metal logo that Benny had yanked free from above the fireplace mantel. But their destination wasn't far now, and Carlos dug deep to get them there.

Only one of the double doors that led from the lobby into the restaurant could open, and it was clear why; the frame of the doorway had been skewed a little by the same force that had sheared off the large room's roof, wedging the heavy door up against the jamb. Surprisingly, the heavy stained-glass panels that decorated both doors were intact, without a single piece broken or knocked out. Carlos continued to propel Benny and himself forward, longing to feel the familiar smoothness of those panels under his palm.

He hoped that the hallway beyond would be similarly unharmed. It would make his heart soar to walk back into a place that was as he remembered it, after walking through such an altered landscape. The hallway, designed to ferry paying customers from the hominess of the lobby into the rustic stone-and-wood elegance of the bar/restaurant, had always struck him as a fine balance of the two styles. Paneled in dark wood, the walls alternated between framed oil paintings of Deertail Mountain and the surrounding forests, and ornate wall sconces holding flame-shaped incandescent bulbs. Its relatively low ceiling made it feel like a hidden passage, connecting the two largest rooms in the Lodge. Either way you went down it, you always got a sense space opening up once you reached the other end, of expansiveness. Carlos didn't realize how much he missed that feeling until the possibility that the hall might have been damaged.

Carlos shifted, taking as much of Benny's weight as he could afford onto his supporting arm so that his free one could reach out and push open the least-askew door. It gave under his hand, easily swinging just as it always had. The darkness beyond took a few seconds to resolve, and when it did he realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it flow out in relief.

"Looks like our luck is holding out," he murmured to his friend, who was slowly becoming more like the rag-doll he had pulled out of a pile of pink slush with every passing second.

"Smurr," Benny said, his head slumping forward. Carlos realized he had maybe fifteen seconds before Benny would return to his unconscious state, and although he hadn't had to lug his friend too far without any help, his own strength was on the ebb, too. The last half hour had taken so much out of him, he feared that if he stopped to think about it, he himself would just fall down on the spot.

He slowly guided Benny through the canted doorway -- there was no reason to risk bumping into either side and causing the pair of them any more pain than they had already endured -- and into the dark hall beyond. It was a surprising relief to leave the open air behind; Carlos had been starting to get the feeling that they had been being watched. None of the hallway's lighting sconces were lit, but he hadn't been expecting any of the building's power to be on anyway.

As the pair shuffled further into the gloom, he realized there was a vague glow from the far end of the hall, dim light from the lobby filtering around the corner to them, thanks more to the nature of the polished wood along the walls than anything else. The strangest thing was the cold air that seem to be infiltrating the hallway. It was almost as chilled as the opened restaurant had been.

Carlos' feet began to speed up, eager to get the both of them into the familiar comfort of the lobby before either of them collapsed from sheer exhaustion, a moment which was going to be within the next ten seconds. Benny exhaled another unintelligible "Murnn," and fell silent, unable to hold his head up any longer. They were so close, just two steps away from turning the corner and stumbling into the building's main room, victorious...

The silence when they turned the corner hit Carlos almost as hard as the cold wind that was coming in through the place where one of the huge plate glass windows used to be. He stopped in his tracks. A few flakes of snow blew far enough into the dark lobby to graze his cheeks as they sailed by.

As feeble as the moon's illumination was, it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust from the lightless tunnel they had just emerged from. Secretly, Carlos had harbored the idea that there would be someone there to greet them, but he was wrong. There was no one. This was not to say that there wasn't evidence of people having been there recently, however.

The first sign that something was amiss was the clothes. There was a substantial scattering of them across the floor next to the main staircase. The hallway from the restaurant came out near its base, so Carlos and Benny (if he were still able to see anything, that was) were looking right at the door that led to the area under the stairs where that skier guy basically lived. Carlos often wondered how many people were freaked out by the grizzled old man coming out from what looked like a glorified janitor closet as they walked out of the restaurant after breakfast, but he supposed that was why he wasn't Lodge Director.

The unceremoniously-dumped clothes looked similar, as if the contents of some woman's closet had been thrown from the landing directly above them. There was more disarray here, too. Aside from the commanding vision of the shattered window, which stretched all the way from the far corner of the lobby to the double set of doors that led in from the parking lot, most of the furniture had been moved from its usual places. The chairs had been shuffled, one of them had been knocked over completely, and the long couch had been pushed farther down along the wall. Carlos, diverting necessary energy from keeping Benny upright, tried to imagine what sequence of events could have occurred to lead to this new arrangement.

It was while he was trying to decipher the drag-tracks of the chair legs in the rug that he saw the blood. There was a large pool of it near the foot of the stairs, and he suspected that in a few seconds his eyes would adjust enough to see a wide splash of it on the polished wood of the wall. Leading away from the large, slowly coagulating pool that must have been where its previous owner fell, the blood formed a trail that led across the rug -- passing underneath one of the repositioned chairs and wove in a drunken line to the huge, broken window, where it passed out into the night. The small pool where the bleeding person must have paused before vaulting over the window's low sill reminded him of the pink pile of snow he had pulled Benny out from under.

Something terrible had happened here, but now the room's only occupant was the cold mountain wind.

Whitelodge 7.3 & 7.4

-7.3-

Glenda and Manoj stood at the window for a long time, just looking down toward the village in the foothills of the mountain, waiting for movement. They would have accepted anything: a flicker of light as a pair of car headlights swept around a corner, the blinking of a storefront sign, the pinwheels of emergency spinners as rescue crews flocked to where the snow-covered service road used to empty out onto the town streets. Anything. But everything was paralyzed, stilled. Only the wavering mirage effect, caused by errant drafts of temperature changes between there and here, convinced them that they weren't looking at a world-spanning snapshot.

"I live down there," Glenda said, whispering as if she didn't want to run the risk of her breath fogging the glass and obscuring the town's lights. "My family is down there."

Manoj turned around and took another look at the bed. At first, Glenda had stared at the strange hollow lumpiness of the sheets almost as intensely as she was now staring out the window. Card-carrying nerd that he was, he couldn't stop thinking of a particular scene from a Star Wars movie, which happened to him even more often than he admitted even to his co-workers. In particular, the scene where Yoda dies and passes into the Force.

Like so many other characters in that saga failed to do, he dies in his bed, a heavy blanket pulled up over his tiny 800-year old frame. As the light goes out in his eyes -- a moviemaking feat that Manoj could appreciate even as child, because puppets have no light in their eyes in the first place -- he fades out of existence, and the blanket hangs dome-like in the air for a fraction of a second before settling into the empty space where the Jedi master's body used to be.

The sheets looked almost exactly like that. Once filled, now empty. As if the people under them had evaporated.

He looked back at Glenda, saw her eyes searching the panorama before them even more desperately. He could almost see the fear ratcheting up in her mind. She was putting the pieces together just as he was: the disappearance of guests she was sure were had been assigned to this room, the oddly frozen quality of the town, and the implications for what that would mean for the people living in that town, perhaps even for the world beyond...

Manoj lifted his hand, went to place it on her shoulder and speak some soothing yet-to-be-determined words that would put her mind at ease...

"Dale!" Glenda called, loudly enough to make his hand recoil. He hadn't yet recovered when the second yell came, even more panic-stricken than the first. "DALE!!!"

Manoj actually took a step back, fearing a third volley. But Glenda didn't feel the need, or maybe was no longer thinking of what was happening around her. Her gaze remained fixed on the lights spread out in a loose grid before them. He imagined that on any other night, it would have a been a beautiful sight, a small town alive with light and life on a weekend night. But the stillness they were witnessing was just... unearthly.

Heavy footsteps came thumping down the hall, growing closer. Apparently the message had been received. Dale's form came bursting into the room, a term that was almost literally appropriate because of the way his shoulder slammed hard into the doorjamb as he entered.

"What is it?" Dale asked, skidding to a stop. Glenda turned and walked toward him, her arms rising in need of an embrace, which the security guard provided without hesitation. As her head rested against his collarbone, Dale looked over her and to Manoj for answers. "What happened?"

Manoj shook his head, unsure of where to start. He wondered how long it had been since the walkie in his hand had made any noise. "We don't know where anyone else is," he said after several false starts.

"What are you talking about?" Dale asked, his frustration already visibly starting to build. Manoj already knew this wasn't going to sit well with the guard; he suspected they were two men with similarly rational minds, and he wasn't processing it well, either. It didn't help that the desk clerk Dale cared about was visibly upset.

"There are no other guests," Manoj said. They had only checked one room, but somehow it seemed a fair assumption to make. "And there's nothing moving down in the town."

"Nothing moving," Dale repeated, clearly disbelieving.

"We've been watching for a while," Glenda spoke up, her voice partly muffled because it was pressing against Dale's uniformed shoulder. "There's *no* *one* *down* *there*."

"That can't be," Dale uttered, his arms moving to pull Glenda even more tightly to him. "A whole town full of people can't just--"

"Then where are the cars?" Manoj asked. "Where are the rescue teams? And where are *they*?" He pointed to the empty heaps of sheets behind them.

Dale turned to look, having to swing Glenda along with him a little to get a look. He stared at the rumples for a long time. "There are lots of other explanations," he said flatly.

"Such as?" Manoj replied. He waited, honestly wishing that some plausible alternatives would come forth.

Dale just stood there, unable to provide any answers. Before he had to sputter something out, Glenda spoke, her voice rendered acoustically flat by Dale's fabric-covered chest. "I was okay with taking this job because I could see the whole town from the front door," she said. "If I was worried about my kids, I could just take a look and at least tell myself that things looked okay down there. But I never, *ever* thought..." Suddenly, she looked up into Dale's face. Manoj thought she might be moving to kiss him again, but instead she whispered, "I've got to get down there! I need to see them, to hug them--"

"Okay," Dale said. All trace of uncertainty about leaving the lodge was suddenly gone. "We'll get you home. Right now."

Glenda rested her forehead against his shoulder again, and a look passed between Dale and Manoj, one that conveyed twin feelings of utter bewilderment, about the lodge, the world beyond, and what Dale had just promised.

Manoj turned around and looked down the slope again, toward the town. It was hard to do with Glenda standing beside him, but he tried to clear his mind and look at the situation analytically. He did this all the time at his job, and when he took a moment to consider it, this wasn't all that different. He had been uniquely trained to look at a simulation and determine what was wrong with it, and how to fix it... so what was the issue here?

He took a long look at the scene while Dale and Glenda continued their embrace behind him, then closed his eyes. He redrew the town in his mind's eye, trying to add in all the details he would expect to see from this vantage point. What would a living town contain that this one did not? He mentally conjured what he should be seeing... the flow of cars, the faint waves of traffic-light red and green that would sweep across the orangey arc-sodium background light permeating the streets, the on-off wink of cell towers, the rotating wedges of light that spun as they led to the runway at the tiny airport on the fringe of town.

Once he had visualized this ideal, he opened his eyes and looked for the changes. He found them very quickly. He had been thinking in terms of artificial illumination, because at that moment so soon after midnight, there was nothing else of the town that could be seen. Everything was outlines. Aside from the temperature shimmering between here and there, that light did not shift or move. It was as if...

"You can't go down to the town," he said without turning.

Dale's rational voice answered from behind him, perhaps after a long enough pause that he might have been removing his lips from Glenda's. "Of course we can. There are snowmobiles in the shed--"

"No," Manoj said. "I mean you will be physically unable to get down there."

A longer pause. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The town's not really there," Manoj said. "Come on." He turned and left the room without looking at them. There were others who would be easier to convince than Dale and Glenda, and he would need them on his side first.

-7.4-

"Can you see where Harmon is?" Kelly was asking Kerren, who still lay across the sofa, her legs necessarily bound and looking around with less confusion every passing second.

"Not exactly," she was saying. Even though she was talking to Kelly, she seemed not to want to look away from Sheryl, who was still clutching her hand. She seemed to not want to look at the author crouching closest to her head. Her eyes pointedly never turned anywhere toward that direction.

For some reason, Kelly didn't want Bruce to be that close to Kerren either. She couldn't exactly put her finger on why -- was it the way his ears seemed to perk up every time something about the injured woman's condition changed? He just seemed too eager to be near her, to touch her, or look at her. It had been endearing at the beginning, when Kelly had thought that he was just a man caring for a stranger, but the longer she was around him, she suspected that there was something else going on. It was still just a hunch, but since she was the only one who had spent enough time with him to know him at all, she felt she should be the one to keep tabs, and run interference if necessary.

Kerren seemed to be searching for words to say. "He was here... well, not exactly here, but in my mind. I think he did... something... that let me wake up, and it's like... he left a part of himself behind. I think can follow back to where he really is."

"It's okay," Sheryl said, smoothing her wife's hair back from her forehead. She seemed not to be listening to Kerren's words carefully. "Just rest. We'll have time to find him later." She kept smoothing Kerren's hair, even after it appeared to be as smoothed as it was going to get.

After a few silent moments had passed, Bruce leaned in close, his voice low and measured. "What else did you see, Kerren?"

Alarm bells were going off in Kelly's head. She had to get this guy away from the injured woman, regardless of how much she admired his work. She was about to say something, anything to stop him from trying to probe any further into Kerren's unconscious visions. Fortunately, she didn't have to speak up, because at that moment they heard Manoj coming down the stairs, followed closely by Dale and Glenda, who were following in step, their hands entwined.

"Did you find anyone?" Kelly asked, loudly enough to drown out any answer that Kerren might be starting to reply with. Everyone's attention refocused, and Kelly breathed an inward sigh.

Manoj didn't speak right away, giving Sheryl enough time to interject, almost panicked with joy, "Kerren's awake! She's okay!"

In the relieved reactions that followed, Manoj managed to get close enough to the couch so that he could only be heard by Kelly. "I need to talk to you and Mr. Chase for a moment. Can we speak over by the desk?"

Kelly's eyes furrowed, not because of her boyfriend's strange request, but because it included the author whose conduct she was finding more and more suspicious. "What is it?" she asked.

His brow furrowed, Manoj just nodded toward the wooden counter on the other side of the room. "Over there. Could we?"

He was overtaken by Dale and Glenda, the couple rushing forward to greet Kerren, now that she had returned to their little group. In contrast, he didn't seem the least bit interested. His eyes were fixed solely on Kelly's, and his intensity unnerved her.

"Sure," she found herself saying, and without thinking about it she reached around Sheryl and touched Bruce's arm. The older man's skin was cool, more so than she expected, even though he had no sleeves and the large room had grown chilly. When he looked at her, she got up. "Manoj wants to talk to us." She turned and walked away with no further explanation.

As she followed Manoj's white bathrobe across the lobby to the broken lobby desk, she considered his expression as he had spoken to her. She had seen it once before, when they were discussing a particularly knotty problem in the sports videogame they had met while collaborating on. It had been one of those moments where real-world physics and enjoyable gameplay butted heads, and she had watched as he had combined her thoughts on the problem and his, and turned them into a series of hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams that spread out farther and farther across the conference room table they worked at. By the time they had worked it all through, she had been wishing that he would sweep them off with one quick motion and lay her across the table in their place.

A similar look of concentration was on his face now, but it evoked an entirely different emotion in her. Clearly, there were things that weren't adding up for him, and he needed to talk them through. That explained why he was asking for help, but what did they need Bruce Casey for?

She placed a hand on Manoj's shoulder after he had reached the front desk and stood, facing away from her, for several seconds. His head lifted and he turned, his puzzled look easing a little once he knew she was there.

"What's the situation?" Bruce asked, coming up to them. It was clear that he wanted to get back to the small group of people standing in wonderment around the resurrected Kerren, listening to her once again state that she might be able to find Harmon, and the subsequent start of another argument between Dale and Glenda, albeit one less passionate than before.

Manoj looked at both Kelly and Bruce gravely before saying, "We found a few things upstairs, Glenda and me. First of all, there are no other people in the lodge. The shapes they left in their bedclothes are still there, but their bodies are gone. Disappeared." When that was met with two pairs of silent, uncomprehending eyes, he blundered ahead. "It led me to my second conclusion, which is this..." He was steeling himself, and finally it came out. "Although we can see it from here, I don't think the town is really there anymore. I could see it from the second floor, but it's empty. Like the beds. I think what we're seeing when we look out the windows is mostly a simulation."

A silent moment passed, and then Bruce asked calmly, as if testing how the word felt in his mouth. "A simulation?"

Manoj spoke evenly, methodically. It kind of made Kelly want to tear her hair out as he went on. "I wondered if maybe I was seeing things. But it's clear that there's no motion going on down there. It looks normal, until you watch it for a little while. You realize that there are no moving lights. No cars going up and down the streets, no changing traffic signals, nothing. Once I saw this, I realized there were two possibilities: that what I was looking at wasn't the real town, or that it was, and it had just been ... taken outside of time."

"Outside?" Bruce asked. "You mean, stopped time? Is that what you're talking about?" He had the casual sound of a man who experienced this sort regularly, or at least thought about it, and Kelly realized it was his world-famous imagination that had made Manoj pull him aside as well as her.

"Right," Manoj said. "That's what I thought it was at first, but the lights do waver, because of the atmospheric disturbances between here and there. Like the motion of mirages in the distances. The cool air down at the snow level makes the warmer air higher up bend the light in strange ways."

"So that wavering is still there," Bruce said, now speaking as if he were trying to expand on Manoj's logic. Kelly understood, but just barely.

Manoj nodded. "Exactly."

"Are those really the only two options here? A fake town or frozen time?" she asked.

"I've tried to find another," Manoj said, "but it's the best I could do. Mr. Casey, I was hoping that I could have you think about this one, too. Is it possible that we -- us, the lodge, and some of the surrounding terrain, considering we can still communicate with Harmon, who got some distance away down the slope before he was covered -- that we all could have been *transplanted* somehow?"

God help them, Bruce seemed to be seriously mulling this over. His eyes roamed over his immediate surroundings as if the answers to all their questions were written there, scattered across the floors and furniture, and he his job was only to piece them together. "It would explain certain things..." he murmured, almost to himself. "Almost as if the force of the avalanche... moved us somehow..."

Kelly couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Come on, guys," she said. "Are we seriously considering this?"

Bruce looked as if she had just slapped him. "Of course. Even beyond the disappearance of the other guests, and what Manoj has said about the town at the base of the mountain, there are other things going on here that can't be easily accounted for."

"Such as?" Kelly asked, crossing her arms.

Bruce looked between the two of them, as if he had just been caught stealing something. She waited patiently, eyebrow arched, for his answer.

Whitelodge 7.1 & 7.2

-7.1-

By the time Dale had pulled all the insulated clothing from the closet, and verifying with Sheryl a half-dozen times that it was okay for him to take her and Kerren's clothes with the intent of giving them to others -- she no longer believed he was going to be attacked by some horrific kind of wooden, horned wall-monster. She had, however, reached a state of alertness unlike any she had ever experienced. Even when she had been in utter darkness, trying to find Kerren, her nerve endings hadn't tingled like this. That had been in this very room maybe half an hour earlier, but time had seemed to stretch out between now and then.

Every rattle of the closet hangers, every scrape and squeak of Dale's work boots against the planks of the floor, was excruciatingly loud to her. Someone had cranked up the color and brightness of everything in her surroundings, regardless of how tightly focused Dale's flashlight beam was, or how its shining white LEDs tried to bleach everything. She stood there as he finished passing her clothing, her arms full of fluffiness, waiting for the next moment with utter clarity, and then the next, and then the next...

Dale swung his light out of the closet, illuminating the short hallway where the women's bed had been jammed up against the corner that led into the suite's main room. "Probably no point in looking for anything in there, right?" he asked.

"Nope," Sheryl answered. It was strange how she could look at the scene of such personal trauma, and only see an arrangement of objects. She had decided not to say anything to anyone about what she had seen in the closet. It was probably her mind's reaction to such an experience of blind force such as she had been through. Unable to comprehend such a thing as an avalanche happening for no reason, her brain was looking for malevolent forces everywhere, to the point where it could make up a very vivid one out of nothing.

"Ready to head back?" Dale asked, holding out his arms to her. Sheryl momentarily thought he was moving in for a hug, but instead he relieved her of about two-thirds of the burden of fabric he had laid across her arms. She didn't respond either way, just followed him back out into the hall, trying hard to shake the feeling of something watching her as she walked out of the re-darkened room.

On the walk back to the stairs, Dale seemed uncomfortable, and before they had even turned the corner back into the main corridor, he asked too-pointedly, "So what brought you two up here this weekend?"

Sheryl almost didn't speak, but then decided to answer, and was surprised to find it made her feel a little better. "It's our anniversary," she said. "Two years."

"Oh!" Dale replied, pleased. "Congratulations."

"Thanks," Sheryl said. "And how long have you been working here?"

"This is my fifth season," he said. "And probably last."

"Aren't you going to rebuild?" Sheryl asked, realizing too late that it probably wasn't up to the security detail to make such a decision.

Dale shrugged under his burden of clothes. "If you knew Jimmy, the owner, you'd be tempted to say yes. His heart and soul has always been in this, which makes it all the harder that all this has happened while he's on vacation. The only one that I've ever known him to take. Even in the summers, he's usually working on the coming season."

"How strange," Sheryl muttered.

"And you know what's even weirder?" Dale asked, as if he were just remembering it as he spoke. "He asked me, about three weeks ago, if I was going to be around on this specific weekend. At the time, I thought it was just because--"

The silence that passed was the most tangibly uncomfortable between them yet. "Why?" Sheryl asked, wondering if it were only the pin of that word would puncture whatever was keeping Dale's words from continuing.

The big man shrugged, as if realizing that the secret was out. "At the time, I thought he wanted to keep me and Glenda separate, while he wasn't around."

Now Sheryl understood. She nodded. "So he knows about you two?"

Dale chuckled a little. "Hell," he admitted, "even I wasn't all that sure at the time. But clearly, he did."

A smile spread slowly across Sheryl's face. "You know, it usually doesn't take a woman throwing herself into a guy's arms to let him know what's going on."

"I know," Dale said, a sheepish tone creeping into his voice. "But it's complicated with Glenda and me. She's married, has kids... I can't say I'm not attracted to her, but I also don't want to be *that* guy, you know? I mean, I was never really sure how much of her side of it was the uniform, or the fact that I'm technically responsible for everyone's safety." He took on a sullen look as the light from the lobby was growing, bringing the hallway around them into focus. "Not that I'm doing such a great job of that lately."

Sheryl moved close enough to nudge his elbow with hers. "Hey," she said, "I think you're doing the best you can. You're just one guy, and this whole place has been half-knocked down. I think you're going about it right."

He nodded thankfully. "That means a lot." His eyes were searching the hall ahead of them, past the point where the stairs to the lobby intersected it. Sheryl assumed that Glenda had headed that direction when she stormed up the main stairs, or else they would have come across her by this point.

Dale gave the dark hallways one more sweep of his flashlight, and then clicked it off. He hesitated before he stepped into the lobby's gray light. His eyes were still searching for her, but Sheryl could tell by his expression whether he really wanted to see her right now or not. Anyway, there wasn't a sign of the desk clerk, not even a sound to be heard in the quiet. She might have gone into one of the rooms.

Sheryl nudged Dale again. "Come on," she said. "Let's get these down to my wife and our friends." She put a playful up-spin on the word "friends" to make it sound like she wasn't saying it seriously, but she really was.

"I just can't believe she still cares about me," Dale muttered, still looking down the hall. "Even though she knows..." He trailed off, then realized where he was and stopped himself from finishing his sentence. He looked back at Sheryl, as if surprised that he had been speaking aloud, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

"I just can't believe it, that's all," he said.

Sheryl nodded. "She seems great. Good in a crisis, stands her ground. My kind of woman."

This made Dale chuckle, and Sheryl found the sound, originating from even deeper in his throat than his speaking voice, pleasing to her ear. Hell, if she swung that way, she'd probably find him attractive too. "We've got people to warm," she said finally. She started forward, heading for the top of the stairs, but was halted by a horrified, desperate sound.

"Dale!" a female voice called from far down the opposing hall. Without waiting for a response, it came again quickly. "DALE!!!", this time with a panicked edge to it.

Dale had dropped his share of the coats and was tearing down the hall, fumbling with his flashlight to get it re-lit even as he was plunging into the darkness, before the second call had died away. Sheryl stood frozen at the top of the stairs, unsure if she should continue and get back to Kerren or to help Dale assist Glenda, who was clearly the source of the distress call.

She watched Dale run, boots clomping down the hall, the way he was unwilling to stop for anything in order to get to her. It told Sheryl all she needed to know about how he truly felt about her. Despite the danger, it made her smile a little.

-7.2-

For a long moment, Bruce just stared at Kerren's opened eyes, desperately trying to recall if Theda's were that color. He couldn't remember, and didn't know if it was because he hadn't seen her in so long, or whether he had just never paid attention. His dreamscape had so much other sensory input to provide, after all.

Neither Kelly nor he moved for a long moment, wondering what was going to happen next. The voice Kerren had spoken with had come breathily, and if her slightly-parted lips had moved to form the words, it had been so subtle as to not be noticed with the sudden opening of her eyes. Those orbs were motionless, which was strangely unsettling because it almost never happened in the living. But she was breathing, slow and steady as she had been ever since he pulled her out from under her bed. So they sat and waited.

"Dale!"

They heard someone -- Glenda, presumably, calling from the upper hallway. The sound passed through cleanly, affecting nothing in the lobby. Another call, this one more frantic, passed quickly on the heels of the first...

"DALE!!!"

Thundering steps came after this, work boots clomping on thinly-carpeted flooring. None of the three people in the lobby turned their heads toward the sound, but they knew if they did, they would see the deep-blue shape of the security guard rushing past the top of the stairs, on his way from one wing of the lodge to the other. That one action seemed to manage the problem, and he thought nothing else of it.

Shortly after came another form, one that none of them saw, this one considerably shorter and lumbering under a pile of clothes, draped inexpertly across both arms. The figure began to descend the stairs, swaying a bit under the added weight. "Little help," it tentatively asked after a few wobbly steps.

Kelly and Bruce looked at each other at the same time. Bruce waited for her to get up to assist; after all, he had been the one who had helped Kerren before. Kelly had already helped Sheryl once. It was the established order of things. But the way there was something about the way the blonde was looking at him: did he imagine it, or was she sizing him up in some way?

"Do we tell her?" Kelly whispered to him. She nodded to Kerren, who was still looking up at the faraway ceiling rafters with vacant eyes. "Before she gets down here, I mean."

Bruce, cursing himself for his paranoia, nodded. "I'll tell her," he said. Before Kelly could voice an opinion one way or the other, Bruce stood and walked toward the bottom of the stairs, hopping up them two at a time to get to Sheryl before she slipped or dropped her load. "Let me help," he said.

"Thanks," Sheryl said as she felt the clothing being taken from her. Bruce ended up taking more than half, and then they started descending again, side by side.

"Now, Sheryl," Bruce said, in a tone that he tried hard not to allow to sound condescending, "we've tried to stabilize your wife's legs. Kelly down there has proven herself quite able in these matters... see how she's splinted her legs? But the side effect has been that she's... well, she's come around a little bit."

Without any other kind of outward reaction, Sheryl was off down the stairs, tossing her burden of clothing over the bannister to keep it out from under her feet. She came down the stairs fast, forgetting to hold onto anything and mostly sliding down the last few. She was running over to Kerren's side, barely missing Kelly as she slid into Bruce's former spot.

Sheryl grabbed her wife's hand, lifted it and held it vertically. "Kerren? Honey?" she spoke down into those empty eyes, the fear rising in her voice as her wife's unresponsiveness continued. "Why isn't she moving? Is she awake?"

Kelly's hand moved comfortingly up and down Sheryl's back. "We don't know. She just opened her eyes." Unsure of whether to tell her the rest, she looked up at Bruce, who was sure to take his time getting his share of the clothes down the stairs. He paused in his journey long enough to give her a go-ahead nod.

Kelly took a breath, braced her palm against Sheryl's back, and then said, "She said something a minute ago."

Sheryl's head whipped away from searching her wife's features, locked eyes with Kelly. "She did? What did she say?"

Kelly didn't answer right away, even though she could tell that the suspense was excruciating for the dark-haired woman. "That she knew where Harmon was."

Sheryl's face fell. She had most likely been hoping for a valiant declaration of love, some eloquent defiance against the darkness that had failed to claim them. Bruce dropped the clothes heavily onto the chair on which Kelly had broken the wood for the splints. "Can you talk to her, Sheryl?" he asked. "Maybe get her to say something else?"

Bruce had to admit that hearing that voice coming from the body of the woman he still half-thought of as Theda had him on edge, too. He doubted it was a coincidence that a woman who logically shouldn't be in this world, and had a portrait the shouldn't exist hanging nearby, would claim to have information she shouldn't logically have. If Theda really was in there somewhere, he wanted her drawn out. Maybe Sheryl was the key to that.

Kerren's wife bent down over her, clasping the barely-conscious woman's hand in both of her own. "Can you hear me, Kerren?" She spoke as calmly as she could, trying to coax out more reaction, like luring a scared animal from a cave. The results were scattershot, no matter how well intentioned, Sheryl only pushing out fragments of sentences: "It's me, honey... I'm so glad you're not... that you're, well, not okay, but... Can you look at me? Or blink if you can't quite move yet... How about squeezing my hand? Are you there?" Bruce was momentarily confused when he saw a dark spot appear on Kerren's sleeve, and only then realized that a tear had dropped from the point of Sheryl's chin.

Kelly was still bracing Sheryl's back with her hand, but Bruce thought she might need more support than that. He moved over to the couch, hoping to come around and set down on the other side of the kneeling women. As the vague outline of his shadow passed over Kerren's face, however, she moved. It wasn't much, just the flicking of her eyes in his direction, but it was the biggest reaction they had gotten from her since her awakening.

Sheryl reacted quickly, not quite making the connection between her wife's movement and that of the author. "Kerren?" she said, her voice suddenly hopeful. "Are you with me?"

Kerren's eyes stopped trying to track Bruce, and shifted to Sheryl. "My legs hurt," she whispered.

Sheryl let out a relieved bark of a laugh, and clasped the bundle of upraised hands to her chest. "I know, baby. I know," she breathed. "We've been working on that. Just keep as still as you can, okay?"

"Okay," Kerren answered. The fear and confusion wasn't quite gone from her eyes yet. "Are we in the lobby?"

"That's right," Sheryl replied, intensely happy that someone was finally asking her questions she had the answers to.

Bruce was just about to jump in and ask a few questions himself, when Kelly did it for him. Her hand, which was already flat against Sheryl's back, slid up to the base of her neck. "Sheryl..." she began, her voice tentative but determined, "... can I ask her about Harmon?"

Before Sheryl could answer, Kerren spoke without looking away from her wife. "I know that name," she said. "I think he's the one who let me come back. He somehow... feels like a Harmon."

Kelly took this as permission to speak to the injured woman directly. "Kerren, you said you knew where he was."

Kerren's eyebrows furrowed. She thought for a second, and then answered slowly, "I think I do. He's here, and not here. Still in my head a little, but also out there." She lifted her free hand and pointed it back over her head, clearly gesturing toward the front windows of the lobby.

"Could you find him?" Kelly asked. "If we went out there?"

"I... think so," Kerren answered. "As long as he stays with me. There's still a connection... but it's so thin..."

Bruce had been standing there, mesmerized, all through this exchange. She didn't sound much like Theda, not like she had when she had first spoken. It could have been his own thoughts projecting his desire to find her onto that fragment of speech, but now that she was really talking, the difference was evident. Still, it was so clearly her face...

There would be time, he realized. It hadn't quite worked out before, but now that Kerren was conscious again, it was more important than ever. Just as she claimed to know where Harmon was without logically being able to, she knew something about Theda. He just knew it. He just had to get her alone, and then he'd extract the information he needed out of her. He was prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to do so.

Whitelodge 6.5 & 6.6

-6.5-

Harmon had never tried slipping into someone's consciousness before. He talked himself into it by rationalizing that this was Sarah, not just anyone. She would understand.

He almost jumped right back out of her when he realized that, despite all outward appearances, this was *not* Sarah. And once the shock of this wore off, he wondered why he would ever have thought she was in the first place. Yes, she was a dead ringer for his former flame, but her presence here, unchanged after all this time, hadn't made any sense. From inside, however, it was clear to him.

This was a woman named Kerren. And he wasn't sure if it was because she was the first consciousness he had ever experienced in this way, but he found her to be an unbelievably intricate web of instincts, experiences, learned behaviors, attractions and repulsions, delusions and convictions. If he had been able to bring his eyes with him, he would have wept at the gorgeous complexity of her mind. Was everyone like this on the inside, he wondered? Was everyone -- even him, a broken relic -- carrying around this vast, messy, wondrous tangle of life everywhere they went? And how could any of them for one second ever forget about the miracle of it?

But for all the marvels Kerren's mind held, it still wasn't the one he had hoped for. A part of him that had known it all along became acutely aware that Sarah did not exist anymore, at least not in this way, this literally incredible webwork of sparking filaments, each one a crossroad, a distinction between one thing and another, the sum total of which were thoughts that the body turned into action. With this realization, his virtual tears changed character, from awe to grieving.

For a long time -- and within Kerren's mind, it seemed like days that Harmon somehow knew in the real world were only seconds -- he explored the fringes of her being, swooping through the vast, still unused places out on the edges of her thoughts, where they was still so much room to grow in the coming years. He sometimes felt as if his own mind were temporally stuffed to the gills, and wished he could conduct these experiments inside his own head. Maybe he could; he'd have time later to find out.

Or would he? He recalled that at this moment his body was lying under a layer of snow beneath a fallen tree in a vast forest of fallen, covered trees. If he didn't find a way to tell someone where he was soon, that body would die, and he wasn't at all sure what was going to happen to what he was experiencing if it did.

Before he turned to this problem, however, there was one more thing he had to check out. It was this feeling he had since he had arrived, a feeling of not being alone in this space. He was almost tempted to say it was Kerren herself, but she didn't seem to be fully present at the moment. Perhaps she was injured in the avalanche, but Harmon had the unexplainable sense that she wasn't home. She'd be back, eventually; there had been no real damage to her brain, and everything was clearly still intact. No, there was something else going on, some subroutine somewhere that was foreign to the overall design. He turned around, trying to determine exactly what it was.

Far back in Kerren's mind, past layers and layers of neurons and bridging axons, there was a door. It wasn't shaped like a door -- in fact, it wasn't shaped like much of anything -- but Harmon could tell that's what it was. And it was ajar. A slow, tiny trickle of perceptions and ideas were emanating from it, as if someone had lit a fire on the other side and was fanning vaporous thoughts through the slim opening. Of course, none of these visual metaphors were really playing out in front of Harmon's spectral eyes; they were just his mind's way of literalizing something that couldn't be comprehended in any other context.

The only thing Harmon knew for sure that it wasn't him. His own presence seemed entirely different that this slow, quiet encroachment from the other side of the door. The strongest sense he received from this gap in Kerren's mind took the form of a word -- *other*. There was something that was leaking into Kerren's mind from *somewhere else*. He had no idea what it was, or where it was coming from, or what that meant for the woman whose mind he was occupying, but it was alien.

He moved toward the gap cautiously, as if it were inherently important for him not to draw attention to himself. The closer he drew to it, and he passed through the dark filaments of thought that were wafting in, he began to receive pictures. They were vague, fuzzy like a bad TV broadcast from his youth, but there were a few flashes that were unmistakable: a stone, tall with a glowing rune carved in the side, its color a lovely, pale orange... a tall, black leafless tree that turned suddenly, as if it were reacting to something nearby... feet hovering inches above lush green grass.

Taken by themselves, these images might have entranced him, because they were all suffused with a sense of serenity, like glimpses from someone's vacation photos. In themselves, they were completely benign and quite lovely. But there was an intent behind them, and it didn't seem entirely... wholesome. It was something that shouldn't be in Kerren's mind.

Without realizing he was doing it, or even *how* he was doing it, Harmon's presence reached for the door. Even though he was repulsed at the idea of touching it, even in this bodiless way, he somehow did, felt its weird coolness, and he pushed it shut. There was a sense at the last moment that whatever was easing its way through realized that it was being cut off, and began to react, but it was too late. Harmon shut the door and -- again, he didn't know how -- fixed it so that it couldn't be reopened. At least, not easily.

As soon as the door-that-was-not-a-door was firmly shut and sealed, Kerren's mind sprang to blazing life, as if he had broken a spell. And while Harmon had been stupefied by the beauty of his surroundings before, as the woman regained consciousness her brain sprang to burning, blazing life like a city as big as a world having all its power switches thrown. Harmon's identity was almost washed away with the sheer voltage of it. He couldn't stay, he knew, but there was a message he had come to deliver, and he had to pass it along before he retreated from the engulfing enormity of one human brain.

He latched onto one neuron on the way back out of Kerren's head, one that seemed to be particularly active, and imparted one of his own thoughts to it. Again, he had no idea how he was doing it. It might have been something primordial, instinctual. He didn't care how it was being done, just that it was.

He was forcibly thrown from Kerren's mind by her consciousness, as casually and thoughtlessly as a waking dog shaking off a flea. As was he pulled back into the macroscopic world, feeling his strength ebbing from him and pulling him back toward his body, he tried to keep a part of himself, a long thin thread of his consciousness, with her.

He flew back across snow and debris, watching all his laborious progress unwinding in moments. He wasn't at all sure he had succeeded in keeping his strange connection with the woman until he heard Kerren uttering a few raspy words, her voice barely able to register surprise at the sudden knowledge she was imparting to the man and woman looming over her.

"Harmon. I know where he is."

-6.6-

The combined forms of Benny and Carlos staggered across the wooden boards of the former restaurant/bar, past the stairway that protruded from the upper floor. The whole thing had been slewed to the side from the force of the avalanche, which was just barely being held back by the sturdy stonework that formed the back wall of the large room. The stairs had almost been folded up in the deluge; they reminded Carlos of when he had been a kid and peeked between the pages of pop-up books, seeing how the various elements collapsed in an orderly, predetermined fashion.

It wasn't until they had staggered out to the middle of the floor, feeling the freezing sky above them pressing down, that Carlos began to get nervous. With the roof torn off the room like this, he was all too aware that if there were a second donwrushing of snow, there would be nothing keeping it from finally overflowing the back wall and filling the room, at best slamming them up against the downhill wall, at worst drowning them in whiteness where they stood.

"Come on," he said to Benny, nodding in the direction of the main door. They had to go around the collapsing stairway, and then hope that the double doors on the far side weren't blocked by debris. If they were clear, it was a straight shot down the hall and into the lobby. Carlos wasn't sure why, but that seemed to be the place they should head for. If he had to say why, he would have said that it was the largest part of the lodge that faced away from the avalanche, so therefore it should be less damaged.

Carlos began pulling his friend that direction, but he felt some resistance. When he turned to Benny, the man was looking the other direction, a dazed, dreamy expression on his face. "What?" Carlos asked him. "What is it?"

Benny had already taken special notice of the fireplace, commenting something about how its stones were still standing. It continued to command his attention. Not only that, but a smile was trying to make itself evident on the injured man's face. It was a totally incongruous sight, such a joyful expression on the face of a man so beaten, cut, and scorched.

"We need it," he said.

"What, buddy?" Carlos repeated. "What do you see?"

Benny was already pulling from him, turning away from their intended exit toward the dark bulk of the fireplace. Carlos wasn't exactly surprised; in this formerly familiar world where everything had now been broken or ripped away, that stony tower was the only thing that looked like it had any real substance. He decided that he would at least find out what Benny was heading for. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger, but then again he could have said the same thing up until two seconds before the kitchen window exploded in Benny's face.

His injured friend steered Carlos across the warped/cracked/loose floorboards of the restaurant, toward the seemingly immovable fireplace. Every now and then, little rivulets of snow would shower down around the sides of it, spilling over the length of wall that the fireplace hadn't allowed to be knocked down. That hearth had always reminded Carlos of the one in his grandparents' house, with its rounded river stones stacked and mortared together with little technical know-how but lots of emotional investment, and he was aware this might be the reason that he was allowing Benny to investigate it more closely.

Lines of light gleamed there now, above the fireplace's mouth, and Carlos realized what had entranced Benny. It was as if the moon itself were shining down on the stones and forming lines of light there, inscribing a message for them alone to see. They both knew exactly what it was, but at the very same time, Carlos could see how its presence felt fantastical.

The logo of the Deertail was a stoic, serifed depiction of the letters "DL" underneath a stylized swoop that could either be a flame, the peak of the mountain that had towered solidly above the lodge until very recently, or possibly a depiction of the literal tail of a deer as it bounded away into the woods. This swoop connected the "D" and the "L", and gave the logo a triangular, traditional vs. modern feel to it. This fixture had been cast in bronze, two feet to a side, and screwed into the stones above the fireplace's mantel. Its polished surface was now catching bits of moonlight, and the pair of exhausted men felt their faces begin to glow as they drew up to it, unable to look away.

The metal logo had come loose during all the vibrations, and hung a little askew. It sure would have annoyed Jimmy Gough to no end to see it that way, the bottoms of the letters pointing upward at an angle, instead of mirroring the level of the floor. He would have ordered a crew to fix it immediately, but now Carlos couldn't say for sure if there would ever be anyone coming to correct it.

Benny's free hand, the one that wasn't wrapped more tightly than ever around Carlos's shoulders, was reaching for the logo. The metalwork wasn't too high off the ground for him to reach, and the fact that he had a difficult time reaching it said more about how much he was leaning on Carlos. But still the bloodied, trembling hand rose up through the freezing air and traced the lines of the cold metal, as if it were experiencing some treasure that it hadn't been sure really existed until now.

Carlos intended to let Benny do as he liked for a moment, and then urge him through the door that led to the (hopefully intact) lobby. Just as he was about to enact this plan, Benny's hand grasped the inner curve of the metal D with sudden ferocity and yanked on it. With a surprisingly weak grinding sound, the logo came away from of the wall, leaving only little downspills of powdered mortar behind. Carlos could see how the metal had been anchored to the places between the stones, the holes that the bolts left behind positioned just so. Now Benny was cradling the thing against his chest. It seemed larger than ever with its new proximity.

"We need this," Benny said, as if stating a known fact.

"Sure, Benny," Carlos said. "But now let's get somewhere safe."

As they turned away from the fireplace, Carlos was secretly glad that Benny had taken down the piece of metal. After this horrific experience was over, it might be the only memento of the Deertail Lodge that would survive.

Whitelodge 6.3 & 6.4

-6.3-

The idea that she might have condemned guests to death by putting them in one room over another clawed at Glenda's mind, searching for weak spots to clamber through and take her over completely. "I... I just can't remember..." she was sputtering, unable to recall even what the second half of her sentence was going to be.

Manoj placed a warm hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll keep looking. I'm sure there wasn't anyone in these rooms. I only remember a handful of other people from the restaurant, and the odds that they were..." Even he seemed to realize how unconvincing his argument was, and he turned and pointed down the hall. "Look!" he uttered, changing gears. "Kelly and I are in room 220, and we're still standing." They were standing in front of 214. Doing the math, he quickly said, "There are only two more rooms between this one and ours." His hand went from reassuring weight to tugging her shoulder. "Come and look!"

He pulled her, stumbling, down the hall. Glenda's eyes turned with dread toward 216 and 218 as they passed. What would be behind them, she wondered, if she were to use her manager's skeleton key to open? Would she even be able to, or would the broken furniture and bodies behind them would be piled too thickly for her even to open them?

Manoj gestured through the still-open door of his and Kelly's room, as if the half-snow-filled devastation inside was supposed to make Glenda feel better. "See?" he asked. He pointed to the only source of light in the room, the small ventilation window that was in the corner past the patio doors, farthest away from the massive pile-up of snow that had plowed into the lodge. "It doesn't go all that far." He seemed slightly frantic, as if afraid that Glenda would totally lose it and he wouldn't know what to do about it.

She had gathered herself somewhat, but it wasn't because of him. In fact, she had been thinking of Dale, and how he would react to this situation. Take it easy, he would say to her if he were here, there are only three rooms here that were destroyed. The odds that you put people in there and don't remember doing it is small. You wouldn't have put someone right at the top of the stairs, right? And you wouldn't put people right next door to Manoj and Kelly either, not if you didn't have to, to give everyone some extra privacy. So you're already down to one room that you have to worry about. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his voice reassuring her, and it did more for her than anything the young man could possibly say or do.

"I see," Glenda said, her voice steadier than she had expected it to be. Now that he head was clearing, she was beginning to think that she knew where she had placed some of the other lodgers. Without saying anything to Manoj, she turned away from his extended arm and his half-ruined room, and looked along the other side of the hallway, at the doors of rooms that looked down the mountain toward the town below. This was often where she put the customers who weren't loaded down with ski gear; clearly, they had come for relaxation, and probably didn't want to look up the hill at the peak. The die-hard athletes, though, Glenda could spot coming a mile away and put on the uphill-facing side of the lodge. It was why she had located Manoj and Kelly the way she had.

She headed for room 215, directly across the hall. Now she could remember the couple that she had placed there... the woman had been dark-haired, with straight-cut bangs across her forehead; the man had been tall, with the little round sunglasses that reminded Glenda of John Lennon. They hadn't seemed as ready to go skiing as much as attend an art gallery opening. Glenda remembered being surprised at how warmly they had greeted her while checking in. And she had put them in 215...

She was moving to the door and digging in her pocket for the master key before Manoj could follow. With practiced ease, she slid the key into the old-fashioned keyhole and twisted it, hearing the tumblers turn inside the antique lockplate. She swung the door open.

Glenda was ready with questions to go along with her apologies for the intrusion: were they hurt, and had they realized what had happened? But she needed no falsely-cheery words. Inside, the room was dark and unoccupied. She moved into the space with increasing puzzlement. The room had been used, she could tell that much; the sheets were slightly rumpled, there was an open suitcase lying across the plush reclining chair in the corner.

Manoj had taken a few moments to overcome his resistance to following her into someone else's room. "Was there someone in this room?" he asked.

Glenda nodded, her head swiveling around, trying to take in the room in its totality. "A couple. Their stuff is here, but they aren't." She was staring at the bed again, as Manoj moved past her. He was looking out the balcony doors, which were the first ones they had come across that looked down toward the town below.

Glenda didn't say anything, but the arrangement of the sheets seemed strange to her. They didn't look particularly disturbed, but they were lumpy in a strange way. It took a few moments before she realized what was strange about them. The lumps still bore the vague shapes of people, as if they had both been asleep side by side, then lithely slipped across their pillows and walked away.

Manoj seemed to be entranced by something outside the windows, but she didn't notice until he spoke. "Look at the hillside," he breathed. He was standing close enough to the balcony doors for his breath to cause a bloom of fog to spread out there. Forgetting about the oddly-placed bedcovers, Glenda moved over to him. His exhalation was just starting to fade from the glass, and as it did, the altered world before her was revealed.

She had never known how much more of the valley could be seen without standing trees. They could still be seen here and there, dark slashes lying almost flat along the ground, more or less covered up by the thick blanket of new snow, but they no longer obstructed the view. For the first time, she could take in the whole vista of the town below, could see its grid of lights in the center spreading out to become sinuous radiating lines as the terrain at its outskirts rose into rolling foothills. It was beautifully lit.

"Why are all the lights still on?" Manoj wondered aloud. "And why can't we see anything going on down at the foot of the service drive?"

Glenda followed his gaze and saw that, not only was the service road itself totally covered, but there was no sign of activity down at the base. There were no gathered emergency vehicles, and in fact there didn't seem to be any traffic at all. The town should have been a shifting maze of headlights, even at this late hour, but there was no motion. Only the faint wavering of distance seemed to hang over the town.

Glenda's brow furrowed, and when she added the mystery of the jumbled sheets behind her, she ended up asking, "Where did everybody else go?"

-6.4-

Kelly was having a hard time breaking the wood in half. She had finally decided to lay one end of it against one of the lobby's upholstered chairs, and setting the other end on the floor. She then tried stomping on as close to the center of it as she could, hoping that it would snap the piece near the middle. But she must not have been bringing her weight down on it enough, possibly because she was wary of how flimsy the hotel slippers were, but she wasn't getting anywhere with it. She hoped Bruce would have more luck with it when he came back from searching the offices, because even though he had the same slippers on, he had more bulk to put behind his stomp.

She tried not to think too much about what Kerren had been whispering. It was probably just the kind of nonsense a woman starting to come back from pain-induced unconsciousness was likely to say. Kelly hoped she had enough time to strap the wooden pieces on the injured woman's legs before she totally came around.

She took a look up the stairs, wondering how Manoj was doing up there. She hadn't minded his going off with Glenda; in fact, she felt better knowing that the desk clerk and the security guard were on separated agendas right now. There was clearly some romantic drama going on there that didn't need to be played out now, or in front of everyone. Her boyfriend would keep Glenda on track, focused on what they were trying to do. They had agreed on a clear plan, and they all needed to stick to it.

"Success!" Bruce suddenly called as he emerged from the dark doorway, startling her. He held up a shoebox-sized object in his hand, white with a red cross on it.

"Great!" Kelly called back. "I've just got to break this wood, and we can get her set up. Let's act quickly, though; she's starting to come around and it'll be easier if she's still out when we do it."

Bruce didn't stop looking down at Kerren as he came around the end of the desk and walked over. "She's coming out of it?" he asked, urgency evident in his voice. When Kelly didn't respond right away, his attitude changed. He turned and looked directly at her. "I felt so badly that my moving her hurt so much. How can you tell she's coming back?"

She'd never heard it referred to that way. "She was just muttering. I was over there by the desk, I didn't hear what." She was going to have to find out why he was so incredibly interested before she told him what was said. Something in his manner didn't quite have her convinced about his reason.

He nodded, disappointed. "Well, let's get her set up before she does." His gaze flicked to the unbroken plank. "Sturdy little bastard, is it?"

Kelly laughed a little at this. "Yeah. If I had my boots, I could break right through it. Maybe Manoj will bring them down for me."

Bruce quickly stepped up, and without a word of explanation, did exactly what Kelly had done, bringing his foot down hard on the middle of the angled wood. And, just as it had for Kelly, it refused to break. Bruce hopped back, wincing. "Ah, Christ!" he hissed through his teeth, and it was hard for Kelly not to smile. He certainly thought he was going to walk up and do what the young woman couldn't. He was quick to explain it away, though: "Must have really bruised my foot trying to kick down Sheryl's door."

Kelly nodded, but was already thinking on how to escalate the war of woman against wood. While Bruce leaned against Kerren's couch, nursing his foot, she walked over behind the other overstuffed chair and pushed it over so that it faced the one she had braced the wood against. If she and Bruce had sat down in them, their knees would have been touching. Stepping between the two chairs, she managed to slide the front of the relocated one partway up the angled piece of wood, so that the chair was tipped backward a little, its front edge resting on the wood. Then she climbed up into the angled chair, hopped up and down a little on its cushion, and heard the muffled but satisfying snap of the wood breaking in half. The chair she stood on suddenly dropped back into its regular upright position, and she managed not to be thrown off.

"And it's just as easy as that," she said.

"Well, that was impressive," Bruce said, amused.

"Can you pass me the gauze now?" she asked, climbing down and pushing the chair back enough that she could pull out the roughly equal-length pieces of wood. By the time she was done, Bruce had opened up the first aid kit and was handing her a roll of self-adhesive bandage. She took it and moved toward Kerren's legs.

"Now," she said as she knelt by the couch and laid everything out, "I'm going to need to remove this pillow propping up her knees, so her legs can straighten out while I splint them. I don't know if she's going to wake up, but can you... soothe her if she does?"

Bruce was already kneeling next to her, with a genuine look of concern on his face. "I'll do whatever I can."

"Good," Kelly said. "Here we go..." She gingerly slid the pillow out from underneath the crooked legs, sliding her hand in to replace it so the knee joints settled slowly into their new position. Kerren didn't exactly wake up, but her brow furrowed and she made a barely audible moaning sound. Kelly obliquely noted that her voice didn't sound anything like she thought it would, based on the few phrases she had uttered a few minutes ago. It was lighter, slightly higher pitched.

"It's okay," Bruce was already cooing, pressing his hand to Kerren's forehead. "She's helping you."

Kelly brought the pieces of wood up and laid them along the outsides of Kerren's legs, after a moment's consideration placing the jagged, broken edges down by her ankles. Then she began to loop the long roll of bandage around her legs. Each time around, she had to lift Kerren's leg a little bit to pass the roll underneath, and both she and Bruce flinched a little every time they did, afraid that the movement would cause enough pain to wake Kerren up. It didn't, but she still knitted her eyebrows and released another whispery groan each time.

By the time Kelly was starting to work on the leg closest to the back of the couch, Bruce seemed quietly flustered. He seemed not quite to know what to do for the patient, or whether he should stop the proceedings altogether. To distract him, Kelly tried to engage him in conversation. "So, I hear you're an author, is that right?"

A moment of stunned silence passed, and then they both laughed. It was a sound she hadn't heard him make yet.

"I've been called that," he responded. "It's the term I most prefer."

"I think I read one of your books," she said as she worked. "Was it the one about the aging rock star and the young producer?"

He chuckled. "Yep, that was me. That one's an oldie but goodie. Came out fifteen years ago. You couldn't have been in middle school then, could you?"

She shrugged, paused to lift one of Kerren's legs to pass the bandage roll underneath. "Just barely. Some of the kids in my class were passing around a paperback copy with the edges of the dirty pages marked. We thought we were really clever about it."

"Oh," he said. "Did you read anything other than the dirty pages? Although I seem to recall there were more than usual in that one."

"I did," she said. "I tried to game it so I was the last one of us to have it Friday afternoon. So I could take it home and read the whole thing."

He seemed to be totally distracted from the operation going on by this ego stroking. "And here I was, not knowing I was a YA writer."

The second leg was finished. Kelly sat back on her heels, exhaled, and looked directly at him. "What I actually liked was the non-YA-ness of it."

He nodded. "Well, thank you. That means a lot, that there was something in it for you. Other than the dirty pages, although writers secretly want their audience to like those parts too."

She was about to turn back to Kerren, ready to take a look at her completed handiwork, when Bruce's hand clutched her shoulder. She stopped, and realized why. Kerren had opened her eyes.

Whitelodge 6.1 & 6.2

-6.1-

Sheryl didn't want to go back up the stairs. While Dale appeared to have his arm around her shoulders, supporting her, in truth he was pushing her along. She didn't like it, but silently thanked him for not making her fear obvious to the others in the lobby. It wasn't that she was afraid of returning to the place of Kerren's injury and all the fear that followed; she just didn't want to leave her wife alone with strangers. If Kelly hadn't been so comforting to her on their trip down to the lobby, she might not have been convinced to leave Kerren's side at all.

The hall was decidedly less menacing, now that she knew what to expect. She knew that the irregularities in the floor weren't dangerous, and similiarly knew what she was going to see when she turned the corner. She had already glimpsed the jumbled pile of hotel pieces that comprised the hallway a little past their room.

All along the way, Dale was murmuring supportive things to her, "We'll just take it slow, check to see if we can get you and your wife some warmer clothes, okay? Then we'll find a way to get word out that we're up here. In fact, it's probably likely that lots of people know about this already, and are working to get up here to make sure we're okay..."

She resisted telling him to shut up, but only because the silence that would then fall was too much to think about. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that without Dale's formidable, calm presence, she would never have been able to retrace any of the steps she had taken this night, no matter how important they were. And right now, trying to find something better for her and Kerren to wear was the most important thing. This made her try to picture the state their room had been in when Bruce had made his dramatic entrance... had the closet door been accessible, with all the piled snow? It might be possible that all their clothes were still there, undisturbed by the disaster that had occurred around them. Sheryl thought that, if she could just get to those relics of the time before the avalanche, maybe some of the strength she used to have would be imparted to her when she put them on again.

Even though she had seen it before, she was shocked when they turned the hallway's corner and saw the utter devastation that had happened so close to the place where she and Kerren had been lying. Then, quickly on the heels of that was the fact that Bruce said his room had been on the far side of it. But how was that even possible?

Dale seemed interested in that question as well, swinging his flashlight all over the torn timbers, fractured beams, bits of light fixtures and other recognizable things from the lodge, all jumbled and distorted into an impenetrable wall. It took her several moments to realize that she was standing outside the broken door to her room, the one that Bruce had carried Kerren out through. The darkness on the other side of the portal seemed to be reaching for her, but she was strangely unafraid of it.

While Dale continued to study the curious debris, she walked through the door into sheer darkness. It had only been a few minutes, but she felt as if she were walking back through time, into some important, traumatically defining moment of her life. Even the smell of the room, which was pretty much the only thing she could sense without light, was already imprinted on her brain.

She stood there a full ten seconds before the light found her, throwing her shadow forward and across the bed Kerren had been pinned under. She could see the large lamp shard where she had left it, tossing it onto the bed after she had set her wife free and Bruce had pulled her out from underneath it. Sheryl had followed, leaving the implement behind, and it was still there, waiting for her.

"Sheryl?" Dale called, coming up beside her, swinging his illumination from side to side. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said, surprising herself with how steady her voice sounded. "The closet's over here."

She stepped a few paces forward, coming to the sliding closet doors just on the near side of the corner where their bed had wedged itself. She could hear water from a broken pipe spraying somewhere behind the bathroom door. She hoped that the closet was free of water damage. She slid the doors apart and gave Dale a moment to swing the light inside.

As he did, she was glad to find that the contents were relatively unharmed. Having just arrived that afternoon, the women had taken the time to hang up the clothes they had intended to use most during their weekend stay -- their thick coats, ski suits, and a range of semi-formal evening wear for when they would dine in the restaurant -- so the central half of it was filled. There seemed to be some tangles of extra hangers above the rod, but Sheryl thought little of it until she pushed the clothes apart.

The face was directly behind the coats as she pushed them aside. It was lined and striated, as if the dark wood at the back of the closet had decided to take on vague human form. It had no eyes but there were hollows for them, as if the wall were pliable and soft, and someone behind it was leaning forward against it. After the initial shock, Sheryl could have convinced herself that it was a sculpture, or some kind of happenstance formation of the closet's back wall being bowed out by the collision of mountain and building... but then it moved.

Without a change of expression, it tilted its head to the side, and the clacking sounds revealed what she had assumed to be tangled collections of hangers on either side of it to really be spiky wooden antlers, attached to either side of its forehead like a stag's. The vaguely-shaped face tipped one way, then the other, as if to disentangle them from the wire clothing supports, and that was when Sheryl screamed.

She threw the coats back together, as if hurriedly shutting a curtain, and jumped back from the closet. "What?!" Dale interjected, and swung the light away from the closet and onto Sheryl. She looked at him, eyes wide, and realized that while he had kept the light focused on what she was doing, he had been looking elsewhere.

"You didn't see that?" she asked, not liking the amount of panic that had leaked into her voice.

"No, what was it?" Dale asked again, and when she pointed into the closet, he shifted the light back into its depths. The clothes were back in place, swinging lightly on the crossbar, but the sound that might have been that of antlers freeing themselves had already changed to hangers still swinging from the force of Sheryl's throwing them back into place.

She just stood there staring at the space where the apparition had been for a moment. Nothing in the closet moved again. She blinked several times, but the LEDs' white light left none of the closet's contents to the imagination, and there was nothing there that shouldn't have been.

"Could you...?" she asked, and pointed. She knew that nothing would be there when Dale moved the clothes around, and she was right. Why should there be? She suddenly felt very tired, all the adrenaline she had accumulated in the last few minutes draining away. Had there really been anything in there?

Dale held the flashlight in his mouth as he began rummaging around in the closet. Sheryl flinched as he separated the clothes at almost the same point she had. There was nothing beyond them now; in fact, she could see the back wall of the closet very clearly. It was the same flat, dark-stained planking that the rest of the walls were.

She'd just have to assume that the weird, animated sculpture she had seen -- she couldn't even cross the mental line that allowed her to believe it was any kind of living thing -- had been the result of fear and mental exhaustion.

Dale held up a pair of fluffy coats, designed more to look good than for their insulating properties. "How about these?"

She nodded numbly and took them. He dove back in, looking for other items that would help their small group stay warm. She kept her eyes on the walls of the closet, completely unsure of what was going to happen next.

-6.2-

Bruce had once written a scene in a book where the protagonist had been forced to explore a dangerous abandoned factory using only night vision goggles. This had been in his pre-Theda days, when his ideas hadn't been nearly as good, but at least he could tell himself that they were his own. He felt that he had really earned them, especially when they turned out half-decently. Now, moving down a completely dark hallway with only one tiny green LED light to guide him, he realized that he had written that distant night-blind scene incorrectly.

What he hadn't conveyed -- and it had been because he had only been guessing what such a suspenseful situation would feel like -- was the way darkness could push in on a person, especially when the light source was just a little weaker than needed. He was experiencing that sensation firsthand now. Out of even the feeble range of the moonlight drifting in through the frozen lobby windows, he began to fully comprehend how darkness was the natural state of things, the primal baseline that privileged humans had forgotten. He and everyone he knew had lived in light almost their entire lives, but now he was returning to the way things had been in the beginning, darkness beyond darkness. He filed these thoughts away, in case he ever wrote another scene like that again (and providing he ever wrote any scenes again, part of his mind told him, a thought which was then itself put away.)

He almost didn't see the large pilaster that had partially fallen across the hallway before he walked into it. It cut the hallway in half at a diagonal, and he paused a moment, studying it. He was suddenly reminded of the heap of debris he had crawled through on his way down the hallway outside his room. At the time, there had seemed to be a narrow path he could crawl through, and he hadn't noticed or heard any cave-ins behind him as he progressed, but once he was out in the open, he hadn't been able to find the way he had come through. The passage behind him had seemed stable and impenetrable. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't shake the idea that maybe he had passed *through* several layers of wreckage to make it out. This pilaster, though, pushed back against his fingers when he put his hand against it. He ducked underneath and continued on his way.

There wasn't much hallway past the obstacle. Bruce held the light out as far away from him as he could get it, the feeble illumination doing little more than giving a general sense of space, only revealing things when it came less than an inch from a surface. He passed the light over the walls at the end of the hall, and found one side to contain a door that was ajar. There was a glass pane in the upper half of this door, and after a few passes he could make out what the block letters stenciled there:

James Gough, Lodge Director.

He pushed through the door into the room beyond. Here, past the door's watery glass, there was a little more light. The windows, which he was sure afforded a wonderful view when cleared of snow, were all but covered; what remained was a thin stripe of diffuse light coming in along where their upper reaches met the ceiling. Bruce swung the light quickly as he moved into the room, trying to patch together a sense of the space out of the tiny radii of light the walkie afforded. From what he could discern, it was an old-fashioned office space, rather small. A desk with shelves on the wall behind it, all of them covered with bric-a-brac, awards, shellacked cross-sections of tree used as bookends. A long bank of cupboards ran under the windows, and it was these that Bruce deemed worth investigating, because they were the only things that looked out of place.

The doors had been recently forcibly opened, and hung askew like broken teeth. He assumed that it was from Glenda's story about trying to hail the outside world from a run-down comm station. He bent, shone the light inside the cupboards. The radio box looked like it might have come out of an old war movie, all tarnished steel and yellowed plastic needle displays. He would have been more surprised if it did work. The shelves on either side of it were bare.

Bruce pulled back, moved over so he could try one of the other cupboards. As much as he wanted them to open easily, and find some kind of first aid kit that could help Theda, he equally wanted to have to break into them as well. It would have helped his sense of frustration, which he noticed had increased since he gained physical proximity to his muse without any ability to communicate.

As he swung his attention to the next cupboard over, his foot hit something, sent it skittering across the floor. It was a small box, surprisingly light. He turned his light to it, and might have cracked a smile when he saw the traditional red cross on its white surface (although thanks to the green light, the cross shone black). He scooped it up and pried it open, the plastic clasp popping open incredibly loudly in the small, silent office. It seemed to be fully stocked with lots of coiled bandages, strips of adhesive, everything he needed.

He clicked the kit shut and turned to head back into the dark-beyond-dark hallway, but stopped short. As his arm came around, he was shocked to see a second light swing along the wall along with it. He hesitated, raised the light again, and watched its twin slide along the wall he knew was next to him. He had found a mirror of some sort. He was about to ignore the effect and leave the room, but then his curiosity got the better of him. He wondered why a lodge director would outfit his office with a large mirror directly across from his desk. He lifted the light again to investigate.

It wasn't a mirror, it was a painting, one that Mr. Gough had cared enough for to put it under glass. Bruce moved his light around and across its surface, trying to get a sense of what lay on the canvas beyond. His hand moved faster and faster, unable to get enough of the image together in his head to fully comprehend it, but knowing that he needed to. After a few moments, he stepped back and took a deep, shuddering breath.

It was Theda. And not only was the painting an uncanny likeness of the woman lying on the couch fifty feet away, but it was as Bruce had always seen her up until tonight: her bare feet stepping through soft grass, robes billowing as if underwater, hair wreathed in flowers. He even thought that the dark shapes along the vertical edges of the work could be the shadowed sides of his own Sounding Stones.

What *was* this? His mind turned the idea that this artifact existed over and over in his mind and couldn't make sense of it... Was it just dumb luck that, save for minor stylistic differences, and the fact that the artist was clearly an amateur, Bruce was looking at an image plucked out of his own dreams? Not only that, but one that appeared to have taken corporeal form this very night?

He thought about this as he picked his way back up the dark hallway, wanting more than ever to look down at that angelic face again, to make sure that all three versions of her -- his dream-memory, the painting, and the actual woman -- were truly one and the same.

Whitelodge 5.5 & 5.6

-5.5-

The feeling of rising was always the same, but this time the relief that came with it was much more pronounced. Harmon guessed it was because his body was in such pain, making the contrast of being suddenly feather-light and outside the cage of his body that much more exhilarating. He could feel the strange currents he had felt before all around him, flowing like infinite, invisible rivers crisscrossing the world. He grabbed on.

His vision shifted, passed up through the needles of the tree that sheltered his battered body, and then he was encased by whiteness. But he didn't feel the panic of being smothered, trapped by that crushing snow. Instead, he knew he would pass through it as easily as he could pass through air. Then his vantage point was above the ground, in a world that had all of its sharp edges rounded off by fallen flakes, every inch illuminated the same by cool, even moonlight.

Harmon's ability to sense what lay behind the things around him had evolved in the past few years. At first, Harmon had thought it had been a series of dreams brought on by living at a markedly higher altitude. Then he thought it had been some kind of hallucination brought on by living under the stairs, natural gas or wood polish or something creeping into his brain. But after a while, he realized that the rising feeling was part of the talent that Jimmy Gough had officially hired him for; it might even be what really lay behind his ability to read people's intentions. The deeper her had pushed into it, he realized that this was his true power.

And so, by degrees, he had learned to use it. In the movies -- or in his vampire books -- there would always be some mentor, someone who laid out the nature of the powers for the hero, what they could and couldn't do, and the moral code that necessarily overlay them. Unfortunately, Harmon had never found one. There was no manual for handling his out-of-body travel. He had no other choice but to figure it all out on his own.

Now he was skimming across the surface of the snow, heading uphill, hoping the he was working his way back to the lodge, the closest thing he had to a home. One of the drawbacks to this power was that, while he could seemingly go anywhere and access anything, his range of vision was shorter than if he had actually brought his eyeballs with him. The world kind of faded to vagueness a few yards around where he "was". As a result, his mind chose to interpret everything as huge and imposing, as if he were flying through an infinitely-enlarged copy of the real world. When he considered that he was doing all this with thought only, it did make him wonder how much what we think of as visual "seeing" is a physical process.

He was sure that what he was moving through was the world as it existed in real time, though. He had done enough experiments with clocks to prove that. He could travel anywhere with astonishing speed, occupy any space no matter how small, pass through solid objects. But it was all still *him*, somehow. He had trained himself, after hours of lying on that subpar cot under the stairs, to push the boundaries of what was possible, to see just how much he could determine with this new sight. It got harder the farther afield and different from human vision as he got, but he was somehow sure that he would never come up against any hard borders.

Today, however, this power needed to save his life, and he thought he might know how. He had felt something on his recent excursions, a way that he might not just observe, but influence the world outside himself. Right now, that hope was all he had. After perhaps thinking that the topography of the mountain had changed completely, he realized that the wide track in the snow next to him just might be the remnants of the submerged service road. He swung out and over it, trying to keep its twists and turns beneath him.

The slight depression in the snow, magnified by the steep angle of the moon's light, snaked back and forth, and Harmon began to wonder what would happen if his body succumbed to the cold while he was away like this. Was he actually outside of his body, or just projecting his vision? He couldn't help but think again of the vampires he read of incessantly... the way they could change shape and fly away when threatened. Maybe he wasn't flying anywhere at all.

The road swung up around a final curve, and then he was weaving among small hills that must have been what was left of the parking lot. He could tell from the shapes that whatever cars there were -- not many, since most people completed their Deertail isolation from the outside world by getting a taxi up to the Lodge -- had been tossed around and now lay on their sides and tops under their thick blankets of snow.

It took a bit of searching to find the lodge after that. Aside from his sense of scale being entirely thrown off by his disembodied traveling, it was all but unrecognizable in its new configuration. The more he explored, the more surprised that it had structurally held up at all. Whole sections of the back half were gone; he was almost sure that the entire lower half of the side of the building facing the mountain had been punched in by the white onslaught, and it was the snow itself that was propping the rest of it up. Most of the crooked north wing was reduced to rubble and timbers, as well. Not only that, but the downrushing wave had crested over the lodge entirely in several places, flowing over it like a wave. The front windows of the lobby had only narrowly escaped being totally covered by the avalanche that had overspilled the roof and piled up in front. The offices looked all but blocked in.

The lobby, though! There was some kind radiance coming from it, one that for a moment tricked him into thinking that the power was still on, or that something had caught fire. As he moved from outside to in, from blinding moonlight to equally blinding dimness, a spot of wonderful warmth and radiance was revealed to him. It was coming from the woman lying across the couch, her body laid as straight as it could be, the faintest of smiles on her lips.

By her light, he could see that there was another woman nearby, messing with what appeared to be a length of wood that had broken off of something, but Harmon couldn't spare attention for anything but the orange-yellow luminosity coming from the supine woman. Her hair was shining golden strands sweeping away from her across a terrain of pillows, and he was secretly thankful that he didn't have to be washed in the beautiful, terrible illumination that would have come forth if her eyes had been open.

It was the woman he had tried to talk to in the restaurant earlier that evening. It had been Sarah after all! It seemed impossible, but then he reminded himself that he was currently a disembodied presence seeing these things and thinking these thoughts. At the moment, he was hardly qualified to say what was possible and what wasn't.

So assuming this wasn't all a hallucination he was having as the last of his body heat bled away into the snow... what was Sarah doing here, after all these years? She hadn't aged, hadn't changed in any way he could see (and he was fully aware that he could duck under her clothes and check for certain birthmarks, but there was that ill-defined moral code to think of. He was pretty sure that would violate it). It was like she had been dropped back into his life after forty years of suspended animation, and now he was just waiting for her to wake up.

Harmon waited for a few moments, hovering, deciding what to do. He had originally come here looking for ways to direct his rescue party to his body's location, but he was now as distracted as he could be. There was one barrier he hadn't crossed yet in his exploration of his new powers, and now would be the perfect time to do it. But should he? This woman -- Sarah! -- was injured, had apparently not come through the cataclysm unscathed. If he were to do what he was considering, he didn't know what he would find. Was she as damaged inside as she was out?

The woman working next to the couch was what clinched it for him. She was still twisting and turning that length of wood, trying to find a way to break it in half. But she kept stopping, kept looking down at Sarah, as if she were checking to see if the unconscious woman was moving, or making some kind of sound. Or maybe there was something in that face that she couldn't keep looking at for long. He doubted that, in the corporeal world, Sarah was glowing the way Harmon was seeing her, but there was something about her that was subtly drawing attention anyway.

He couldn't pass by and not try. He couldn't picture anything else happening after this moment. So he tried it. He closed his eyes and held his breath -- knowing full well that he needed to do neither of these things -- and slipped into the sleeping woman's mind, as easily as sliding under the placid surface of a still pond.

-5.6-

After the fire touched Benny's head, Carlos suddenly found himself suddenly trying to wrangle a raw pile of nerves and muscles. It had taken several minutes of Benny thrashing around in the snow, aware that he had been hurt, but unable to figure out how or why, until Carlos could get him to calm down. He eventually managed to get his co-worker settled on the damp floor, pulling him over to sit up against some of the cabinets that had been left intact, his arms trying to keep Benny's arm from continuing to pinwheel, although they were losing intensity with every second. After Benny had relaxed somewhat, his breath heavy and petulant, his head hung forward in exhaustion, Carlos had the time to inspect exactly what the flame had done. As he did, Benny didn't seem to be entirely awake, or entirely asleep either.

He checked the wound on his friend's scalp. The flames had mostly done what he had hoped; the edges of the gash had blackened and curled back a little, stopping the worst of the bleeding. He wanted to go get more clean towels and finish the job, but first he had to make sure Benny wasn't going to get up and run away once he let him go. So they sat side by side against the cabinet, one of the cold brass drawer knobs digging into their backs, and took a moment to relax.

Despite all Carlos had accomplished, he was now more nervous than he had been before. He had checked off just about everything on his mental list, and the road forward was less clear than it had been since the kitchen had imploded with that horrific whiteness. He had time now to think about things other than what was right in front of him, and in doing that felt the world unfolding like an origami model, the angles that used to underpin its sane structure now turning into a blank, featureless open plain. He had too many choices now, too many possible courses of action.

At least he could pretend, until he caught his breath, that he and Benny were just taking a break, hunkering down on the kitchen floor. At times like this, they often would step out the back door to sit on the bench there, feeling the cool breeze contrast against the sweaty confines of the kitchen, but now he doubted if that bench even existed anymore.

"Carlos?" Benny said suddenly, his voice incredibly loud against the distant hush of the hissing gas from the stove. It had only recently stopped sputtering, indignant against what purpose it had recently been used for.

For a moment, Carlos wasn't sure whether he should answer, but he eventually responded, "Yeah, Benny?"

"Don't... don't burn me again," he said. Benny's head was slumped forward, his voice sounding annoyed, as if Carlos had used such drastic measures merely to wake him up from a particularly satisfying sleep.

"Well, stop bleeding so much then," Carlos answered.

Benny's right hand rose between them, and the fingers touched his own forehead -- just a little below where the gruesome slash began -- before swinging out in a limp salute. "You got it."

Carlos actually laughed aloud at that, surprising himself. He placed his own hand on his friend's shoulder. For a moment, the illusion that they were just sitting together was complete. But they couldn't linger, had to get moving.

Carlos looked toward the hallway that ended in a swinging door that led into the restaurant/bar. No one had come through it since the avalanche. They hadn't even heard any voices, so that wasn't a good sign. If there was no one out there to come help them, that meant they were going to have to marshal their forces and go out there under their combined power.

"Think you can get up, buddy?" Carlos said, nudging his friend.

Benny's head, followed belatedly by his eyes, rotated up until he was looking at Carlos, then past him to look up toward the refrigerator lights. The way his gaze went right past him made Carlos shiver, harder than he had at any moment since the kitchen had been half-destroyed and brought below freezing.

"Maybe," Benny said, his lower lip hanging slack off his teeth. It was like the cut on his scalp had loosened the skin over the rest of his skull. "Let's not go into the light, though."

Carlos couldn't even laugh at Benny's joke this time, if that's even what it was. Suddenly comparing the tiny bulb inside the fridge to a near-death experience was too much, too cruel. "No, not this time," Carlos answered.

He lifted his arm and put it around Benny's shoulders again, trying to duplicate the way he had pried them up off the floor earlier. This time, however, Benny was somewhat aware of what was going on, and he could assist more. In half the time, they were up and on their feet. As much as he tried to avoid it, Carlos couldn't avoid turning Benny toward the spot where he had been blindsided by the avalanche. If the injured man had any reaction to the heap of bloody slush and towels there, next to a steaming pot of soup sitting nearby, he kept it internal.

"Down the hall, Benny," Carlos said, nodding past the refrigerators and into the dark area beyond. "We've got to head up through the restaurant."

"Is that where the rest of them are?" Benny asked, making a supreme effort to keep his body weight positioned over his feet and his head atop his neck.

"I don't know," Carlos answered, "but we've got to find out. Ready?"

The creature with two of everything began to stumble forward. It took every ounce of combined strength for them to leave the somewhat stable safety of the half-demolished kitchen and stagger down the service hallway toward the dining room, Carlos trying to make sure that if they were going to bump into the wall, it would be on his side. Even before they reached the door's dark smoothness, Carlos could tell he wasn't going to like what was beyond it. On every other approach, back when the world was whole, he could always make out the flickering light from the wide fireplace beyond, accompanied by the sounds of china and crystal and conversation that was the sound that all chefs secretly live for. Now, there was nothing. He could see the door's faint outline, but it was limned only in cool, steady moonlight.

This time, it was Benny that drew Carlos along, seemingly oblivious to (or perhaps just more accepting of) the unending strangeness they had been thrown into. Even though his head still hung down loosely, Benny's hand raised automatically and pressed flat against the semicircle on the right side of the door. A changed world revealed itself as Benny's hand swung the door open easily on its long hinge.

The restaurant/bar stuck out from the side of the two-story design of the rest of the lodge, providing its diners a full panorama of the mountain as it sloped downhill on two sides. Now that view was augmented by a total view upwards as well; the peaked roof, formerly full of sturdy wooden rafters, had been completely torn away, leaving the dining floor fully open to the night sky.

The walls, strangely enough, were still standing for the most part. The restaurant now appeared as if it were a notch carved in the side of the mountain, because the icy torrent that had slid down and blown in the kitchen window had found its match in the restaurant's uphill wall, fortified by the huge stones of the oversized fireplace that blazed warmly through every dining service the Deertail had ever seen. Towering over them, the new face of the mountain hovered just over the upper edge of that wall. The thickness of chimney still stood defiantly, its full height totally exposed now that the roof no longer existed. It looked like the prow beam of a ship breaking through a frozen wave. Below, tables, chairs and stools were mostly arranged around the elliptical bar as they had been before, which made Carlos imagine the roof had been removed as cleanly as a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under the place settings of a banquet table.

"Do you see this, Benny?" Carlos asked under his breath, not really expecting an answer.

His companion began to make a coughing sound. Carlos didn't realize for several seconds that Benny was actually laughing. "The stones... they still stand!" the injured man exhorted, as if he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. Carlos was surprised he could see the chimney at all, the way he could hardly hold his head up.

"Yep, they sure are, buddy," Carlos said. "But that's about all." He looked deep into the mouth of the fireplace, and realized that, even though minor falls of snow were still coming down on either side of the stonework, a few embers still smoldered in its interior. The fact that some bit of warmth still existed in this blasted, frigid world gave him more hope than anything he had experienced yet.

"Not to worry," Benny said. "She's being tested, but she's going to make everything all right."

Carlos had no idea what he was talking about. Much later, he would wonder what part of Benny's brain had been jostled, and in just what way, to make him aware of something he -- none of them, actually -- could possibly have known at that point.